76^ 




Class, 
Book. 






ADDRESS 



OF 



PRESIDENT WILSON 



TO THE 



CITIZENSHIP CONVENTION 

WILSON NORMAL SCHOOL BUILDING 
WASHINGTON, D. C, JULY 13, 1916 




WASHINGTON 
1916 







D. of D. 
AUG 7 1916 



ADDRESS. 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen : 

I have come here for the simple purpose of expressing my very 
deep interest in what these conferences are intended to attain. It 
is not fair to the great multitudes of hopeful men and women who 
press into this country from other countries that we should leave 
them without that friendly and intimate instruction which will 
enable them very soon after they come to find out what America is 
like at heart and what America is intended for among the nations of 
the world. 

I believe that the chief school that these people must attend after 
they get here is the school which all of us attend, which is furnished 
by the life of the communities in which we live and the nation to 
which we belong. It has been a very touching thought to me some- 
times to think of the hopes which have drawn these people to 
America. I have no doubt that many a simple soul has been thrilled 
by that great statue standing in the harbor of Xew York and seeming 
to lift the light of liberty for the guidance of the feet of men ; and 
I can imagine that they have expected here something ideal in the 
treatment that they will receive, something ideal in the laws which 
they would have to live under, and it has caused me many a time to 
turn upon myself the eye of examination to see whether there burned 
in me the true light of the American spirit which they expected to 
find here. It is easy, my fellow-citizens, to communicate physical 
lessons, but it is very difficult to communicate spiritual lessons. 
America was intended to be a spirit among the nations of the world, 
and it is the purpose of conferences like this to find out the best way 
to introduce the newcomers to this spirit, and by that very interest 
in them to enhance and purify in ourselves the thing that ought to 
make America great and not only ought to make her great, but ought 
to make her exhibit a spirit unlike any other nation in the world. 

I have never been among those who felt comfortable in boasting 
of the superiority of America over other countries. The way to 
cure yourself of that is to travel in other countries and find out 
how much of nobility and character and fine enterprise there is 
everywhere in the world. The most that America can hope to do 
is to show, it may be, the finest example, not the only example, of 
the things that ought to benefit and promote the progress of £he 
world. 

52186—16 3 



So my interest in this movement is as much an interest in our- 
selves as in those whom we are trying to Americanize, because if 
we are genuine Americans they cannot avoid the infection ; whereas, 
if we are not genuine Americans, there will be nothing to infect 
them with, and no amount of teaching, no amount of exposition of 
the Constitution, — which I find very few persons understand, — no 
amount of dwelling upon the idea of liberty and of justice will ac- 
complish the object we have in view, unless we ourselves illustrate 
the idea of justice and of liberty. My interest in this movement is, 
therefore, a two-fold interest. I believe it will assist us to become 
self-conscious in respect of the fundamental ideas of American life. 
When you ask a man to be loyal to a government, if he comes 
from some foreign countries, his idea is that he is expected to be 
loyal to a certain set of persons like a ruler or a body set in authority 
over him, but that is not the American idea. Our idea is that he 
is to be loyal to certain objects in life, and that the only reason he 
has a President and a Congress and a Governor and a State Legisla- 
ture and courts is that the community shall have intrumentalities 
by which to promote those objects. It is a cooperative organization 
expressing itself in this Constitution, expressing itself in these 
laws, intending to express itself in the exposition of those laws by 
the courts; and the idea of America is not so much that men are 
to be restrained and punished by the law as instructed and guided 
by the law. That is the reason so many hopeful reforms come to 
grief. A law cannot work until it expresses the spirit of the com- 
munity for which it is enacted, and if you try to enact into law 
what expresses only the spirit of a small coterie or of a small 
minority, you know, or at any rate you ought to know, beforehand 
that it is not going to work. The object of the law is that there, 
written upon these pages, the citizen should read the record of the 
experience of this state and nation ; what they have concluded it is 
necessary for them to do because of the life they have lived and 
the things that they have discovered to be elements in that life. 
So that we ought to be careful to maintain a government at which 
the immigrant can look with the closest scrutiny and to which he 
should be at liberty to address this question : "You declare this to 
be a land of liberty and of equality and of justice; have you made 
it so by your law?" We ought to be able in our schools, in our 
night schools and in every other method of instructing these people, 
to show them that that has been our endeavor. We cannot conceal 
from them long the fact that we are just as human as any other 
nation, that we are just as selfish, that there are just as many mean 
people amongst us as anywhere else, that there are just as many 
people here who want to take advantage of other people as you can 
find in other countries, just as many cruel people, just as many 



people heartless when it comes to maintaining and promoting their 
own interest; but you can show that our object is to get these people 
in harness and see to it that they do not do any damage and are not 
allowed to indulge the passions which would bring injustice and ca- 
lamity at last upon a nation whose object is spiritual and not material. 

America has built up a great body of wealth. America has become, 
from the physical point of view, one of the most powerful nations 
in the world, a nation which if it took the pains to do so, could build 
that power up into one of the most formidable instruments in the 
world, one of the most formidable instruments of force, but which 
has no other idea than to use its force for ideal objects and not for 
self-aggrandizement. 

We have been disturbed recently, my fellow-citizens, by certain 
symptoms which have showed themselves in our body politic. Cer- 
tain men, — I have never believed a great number, — born in other 
lands, have in recent months thought more of those lands than they 
have of the honor and interest of the government under which they 
are now living. They 'have even gone so far as to draw apart in spirit 
and in organization from the rest of us to accomplish some special 
object of their own. I am not here going to utter any criticism of 
these people, but I want to say this, that such a thing as that is ab- 
solutely incompatible with the fundamental idea of loyalty, and that 
loyalty is not a self-pleasing virtue. I am not bound to be loyal to 
the United States to please myself. I am bound to be loyal to the 
United States because I live under its laws and am its citizen, and 
whether it hurts me or whether it benefits me, I am obliged to be 
loyal. Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute 
principle of self-sacrifice. Loyalty means that you ought to be ready 
to sacrifice every interest that you have, and your life itself, if your 
country calls upon you to do so, and that is the sort of loyalty which 
ought to be inculcated into these newcomers, that they are not to be 
loyal only so long as they are pleased, but that, having once entered 
into this sacred relationship, they are bound to be loyal whether they 
are pleased or not; and that loyalty 'which is merely self -pleasing is 
only self-indulgence and selfishness. No man has ever risen to the 
real stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer 
to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself. 

These are the conceptions which we ought to teach the newcomers 
into our midst, and we ought to realize that the life of every one of 
us is part of the schooling, and that we cannot preach loyalty unless 
we set the example, that we cannot profess things with any in- 
fluence upon others unless we practice them also. This process 
of Americanization is going to be a process of self-examination, a 
process of purification, a process of rededication to the things which 
America represents and is proud to represent. And it takes a great 



deal more courage and steadfastness, my fellow-citizens, to repre- 
sent ideal things than to represent anything else. It is easy to lose 
your temper, and hard to keep it. It is easy to strike and some- 
times very difficult to refrain from striking, and I think you will 
agree with me that we are most justified in being proud of doing 
the things that are hard to do and not the things that are easy. 
You do not settle things quickly by taking what seems to be the 
quickest way to settle them. You may make the complication just 
that much the more profound and inextricable, and, therefore, what 
I believe America should exalt above everything else is the 
sovereignty of thoughtfulness and sympathy and vision as against 
the grosser impulses of mankind. No nation can live without vision, 
and no vision will exalt a nation except the vision of real liberty and 
real justice and purity of conduct. 

o 



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